Starring: Edward Norton, Bruce Willis, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Bobby Cannavale, Cherry Jones, Alec Baldwin, Willem Dafoe
Distributor: Roadshow Films
Runtime: 144 mins. Reviewed in Mar 2020
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If nothing else. ‘Motherless Brooklyn’ is without doubt a labour of love for its writer-director-star Edward Norton. Adapting the 1999 novel of the same name by Jonathan Lethem, Norton likely cashed in a substantial amount of goodwill to get the project greenlit and assemble the impressive roster of onscreen talent (he first acquired the rights over two decades ago). Though handsomely made and set in a fascinating period in recent American history (New York City in the 1950s), the story and the unusual mystery at its centre aren’t exactly gripping. While there must have been something in Lethem’s novel that inspired Norton to pour himself into the work, whatever that was doesn’t seem to have made the transition from the page to the screen.
The plot centres on Lionel Essrog (Norton), a small-time NYC detective who has near-photographic memory but suffers from Tourette’s, a disorder that manifests itself in an inability to control his impulses. The result is a lot of jerky tics and rapid, stream of consciousness wordplay as Lionel spits out a jumble of words resembling choppy poetry, often piling up rhymes and quasi-homophones as his mind tries to iron out a messy phrase. Norton’s work partially recalls Joaquin’s Phoenix’s lauded transformation in ‘Joker’, both men painfully contorting their bodies as they do battle with their non-compliant minds. The similarities don’t go much further than that, because Lionel never feels that different to the actor himself – the character just looks and feels like Edward Norton grappling with a disorder, without much added depth or psychological richness beyond that.
One day during a planned meet with a client, Lionel’s mentor and boss Frank Minna (Bruce Willis) is shot and killed. With Frank’s other remaining investigators, Tony (Bobby Cannavale), Gilbert (Ethan Suplee) and Danny (Dallas Roberts, wonderfully sensitive), Lionel begins to investigate Frank’s open cases to find his killer. This path leads him toward Laura (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), a black girl whose father owns a jazz club frequented by Frank, and a corporation tied to shadowy pollie-cum-property developer and urban renewal evangelist Moses Randolph (Alec Baldwin).
Though the mystery is a little flat (Willis doesn’t get much of a chance to leave an impression as Frank, so there’s only Lionel’s earnest explanation of how Frank saved him and his fellow detectives from an abusive orphanage to make us care about him and his killer), the film’s setting alone should keep viewers interested throughout the laborious runtime. 1950s New York is powerfully evoked by the film’s costuming and design, and the tension between the city’s gentrification and the forced eviction of predominantly black communities makes for a fascinating backdrop. It’s a topic that one would be forgiven for never previously considering (New York City feels as though it bears most of its history on its surface), which makes its consideration throughout ‘Motherless Brooklyn’ only more intriguing.
Norton’s filmmaking is confident albeit occasionally clumsy. His writing and collaboration with editor Joe Klotz let the plot unfold at a leisurely pace, and his enlisting of prolific British composer Daniel Pemberton to provide the film’s odd but excellent jazz-inspired score further speaks to the trust that he places in his narrative. This self-assurance and moments of melancholy grace that Norton achieves always make you feel like you’re in good hands, even when the film hits the occasional snag (most thrown up by a story that doesn’t always move logically or in interesting ways, though also intermittently stemming from an odd cinematography or editing choice).
As Lionel gets closer to the moral black hole at the centre of his whodunit, certain parallels with a current American President become almost too clear, the subtext threatening to overwhelm the text. As it turns out, two of many changes to the book made by Norton when adapting it were moving its setting to the 50s (the novel was set in the 90s) and adding the Randolph character. These were big and bold decisions for a filmmaker undertaking only their second feature (Norton made his directorial debut back in 2000 with the underappreciated religious romcom ‘Keeping the Faith’) and they were responsible in a way for the best and worst elements of his finished film (respectively its absorbing milieu and its unremarkable mystery). While this makes it clear that Norton isn’t a fully-developed filmmaker yet, he’s certainly an audacious one, a quality that should serve him well in whatever he turns his hand to next.
Callum Ryan is an associate of the Australian Catholic Office for Film & Broadcasting.
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